Politics

Aug 10, 2026 Nina L. Khrushcheva

When Vladimir Putin revives Stalin-era repression tactics, he does not do so in service of some lofty ideology or grand project. Rather, he and his security apparatus are seeking to safeguard their own power indefinitely—and, as Russians well know, they will stop at nothing to succeed.

MOSCOW—In the early 1950s, a group of prominent, mostly Jewish doctors from Moscow was accused of plotting to assassinate Soviet leaders on orders from the West. The accused were fired from their jobs, arrested, and tortured. But after Joseph Stalin died in 1953, Lavrenty Beria—one of Stalin’s longest-serving secret police chiefs, who oversaw the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1938–45 and spent decades filling the Gulags—called off the investigation. As it turned out, the security services had made the whole thing up.